The unusual appearance of deep-sea fish like the oarfish or slender ribbonfish in Japanese shallow waters does not mean that an earthquake is about to occur, according to a new statistical analysis.
The unusual appearance of deep-sea fish like the oarfish or slender ribbonfish in Japanese shallow waters does not mean that an earthquake is about to occur, according to a new statistical analysis.
The study published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America contradicts long-held Japanese folklore that deep sea fish sightings are a sign of an imminent earthquake, say Yoshiaki Orihara of Tokai University in Japan and colleagues.
When the researchers examined the relationship between deep-sea fish appearances and earthquakes in Japan, however, they found only one event that could have been plausibly correlated, out of 336 fish sightings and 221 earthquakes.
“As a result, one can hardly confirm the association between the two phenomena,” the authors write in the BSSA paper.
Read more at Seismological Society of America
